Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street

Judith Butler

In the last months there have been, time and again, mass
demonstrations on the street, in the square, and though these are very often
motivated by different political purposes, something similar happens: bodies
congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space
as public space. Now, it would be easier to say that these demonstrations or,
indeed, these movements, are characterized by bodies that come together to make
a claim in public space, but that formulation presumes that public space is
given, that it is already public, and recognized as such. We miss something of
the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public
character of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds
gather. So though these movements have depended on the prior existence of
pavement, street, and square, and have often enough gathered in squares, like
Tahrir, whose political history is potent, it is equally true that the
collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and
organize the architecture. As much as we must insist on there being material
conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is
that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and
produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. And
when crowds move outside the square, to the side street or the back alley, to
the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more happens.
At such a moment, politics is no longer defined as the exclusive business of
public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and
again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or
on the street, or in the neighborhood, or indeed in those virtual spaces that
are unbound by the architecture of the public square. So when we think about
what it means to assemble in a crowd, a growing crowd, and what it means to
move through public space in a way that contests the distinction between public
and private, we see some way that bodies in their plurality lay claim to the
public, find and produce the public through seizing and reconfiguring the
matter of material environments; at the same time, those material environments
are part of the action, and they themselves act when they become the support
for action. In the same way, when trucks or tanks suddenly become platforms for
speakers, then the material environment is actively reconfigured and
re-functioned, to use the Brechtian term. And our ideas of action then, need to
be rethought. In the first instance, no one mobilizes a claim to move and
assemble freely without moving and assembling together with others. In the
second instance, the square and the street are not only the material supports
for action, but they themselves are part of any theory of public and corporeal
action that we might propose. Human action depends upon all sorts of supports –
it is always supported action. But in the case of public assemblies, we see
quite clearly not only that there is a struggle over what will be public space,
but a struggle as well over those basic ways in which we are, as bodies,
supported in the world – a struggle against disenfranchisement, effacement, and
abandonment.

Of course, this produces a quandary. We cannot act without supports,
and yet we must struggle for the supports that allow us to act. Of course, it
was the Roman idea of the public square that formed the background for
understanding the rights of assembly and free speech, to the deliberate forms
of participatory democracy. Hannah Arendt surely had the Roman Republic in mind
when she claimed that all political action requires the “space of appearance.” She writes, for instance, “the Polis,
properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the
organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together,
and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no
matter where they happen to be.” The “true” space then lies “between the
people” which means that as much as any action takes place somewhere located,
it also establishes a space which belongs properly to alliance itself. For
Arendt, this alliance is not tied to its location. In fact, alliance brings
about its own location, highly transposable. She writes: “action and speech
create a space between the participants which can find its proper location
almost anywhere and anytime.” (Arendt, The
Human Condition, 198). So how do we understand this highly transposable
conception of political space? Whereas Arendt maintains that politics requires
the space of appearance, she also claims that space is precisely what politics
brings about: “it is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word,
namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men
(sic) exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their
appearance explicitly.” Something of what she says here is clearly true. Space
and location are created through plural action. And yet, her view suggests that
action, in its freedom and its power, has the exclusive power to create
location. And such a view forgets or refuses that action is always supported,
and that it is invariably bodily, even in its virtual forms. The material
supports for action are not only part of action, but they are also what is
being fought about, especially in those cases when the political struggle is
about food, employment, mobility, and access to institutions. To rethink the
space of appearance in order to understand the power and effect of public
demonstrations for our time, we will need to understand the bodily dimensions
of action, what the body requires, and what the body can do, especially when we
must think about bodies together, what holds them there, their conditions of persistence
and of power.

This evening I would like to think about this space of appearance
and to ask what itinerary must we travel to move from the space of appearance
to thecontemporary politics of the
street? Even as I say this, I cannot hope to gather together all the forms of
demonstration we have seen, some of which are episodic, some of which are part
of ongoing and recurrent social and political movements, and some of which are
revolutionary. I hope to think about what might gather together these gatherings,
these public demonstrations during the winter of 2011 against tyrannical
regimes in North Africa and the Middle East, but also against the escalating
precarization of working peoples in Europe and in the Southern hemisphere, the
struggles for public education throughout the US and Europe, and those
struggles to make the street safe for women, gender and sexual minorities,
including trans people, whose public appearance is too often punishable by
legal and illegal violence. Very often the claim that is being made is that the
streets must be made safe from the police who are complicit in criminality,
especially on those occasions when the police support criminal regimes, or
when, for instance, the police commit the very crimes against sexual and gender
minorities that they are supposed to stop. Demonstrations are one of the few
ways that police power is overcome, especially when they become too large and
too mobile to be contained by police power, and when they have the resources to
regenerate themselves. Perhaps these are anarchist moments or anarchist
passages, when the legitimacy of a regime is called into question, but when no
new regime has yet come to take its place. This time of the interval is the
time of the popular will, not a single will, not a unitary will, but one that
is characterized by an alliance with the performative power to lay claim to the
public in a way that is not yet codified into law, and that can never be fully
codified into law. How do we understand this acting together that opens up time
and space outside and against the temporality and established architecture of
the regime, one that lays claim to materiality, leans into its supports, draws
from its supports, in order to rework their functions? Such an action
reconfigures what will be public, and what will be the space of politics.

Arendt’s view is confounded by its own gender politics, relying as
it does on a distinction between the public and private domain that leaves the
sphere of politics to men, and reproductive labour to women. If there is a body
in the public sphere, it is masculine and unsupported, presumptively free to
create, but not itself created. And the body in the private sphere is female,
ageing, foreign, or childish, and pre-political. Although she was, as we know
from the important work of Adriana Cavarero, a philosopher of natality, Arendt
understood this capacity to bring something into being as a function of
political speech and action. Indeed, when male citizens enter into the public
square to debate questions of justice, revenge, war, and emancipation, they
take the illuminated public square for granted as the architecturally bounded
theatre of their speech. Their speech becomes the paradigmatic form of action,
physically cut off from the private domicile, itself shrouded in darkness and
reproduced through activities that are not quite action in the proper and
public senses. Men make the passage from that private darkness to that public
light and, once illuminated, they speak, and their speech interrogates the
principles of justice it articulates, becoming itself a form of critical
inquiry and democratic participation. For Arendt, rethinking this scene within
political modernity, their speech is understood as the bodily and linguistic
exercise of rights. Bodily and linguistic – how are we to understand these
terms and their intertwining here?

For politics to take place, the body must appear. I appear to
others, and they appear to me, which means that some space between us allows
each to appear. We are not simply visual phenomena for each other – our voices
must be registered, and so we must be heard; rather, who we are, bodily, is
already a way of being “for” the other, appearing in ways that we cannot see,
being a body for another in a way that I cannot be for myself, and so
dispossessed, perspectivally, by our very sociality. I must appear to others in
ways for which I cannot give an account, and in this way my body establishes a
perspective that I cannot inhabit. This is an important point because it is not
the case that the body only establishes my own perspective; it is also that
which displaces that perspective, and makes that displacement into a necessity.
This happens most clearly when we think about bodies that act together. No one
body establishes the space of appearance, but this action, this performative
exercise happens only “between” bodies, in a space that constitutes the gap
between my own body and another’s. In this way, my body does not act alone,
when it acts politically. Indeed, the action emerged from the “between.”

For Arendt, the body is not primarily located in space, but with
others, brings about a new space. And the space that is created is precisely
between those who act together. The space of appearance is not for her only an
architectural given: “the space of appearance comes into being” she writes,
“wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore
predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the
various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public
realm can be organized.” (Arendt, The
Human Condition, 199) In other words, this space of appearance is not a
location that can be separated from the plural action that brings it about. And
yet, if we are to accept this view, we have to understand how the plurality
that acts is itself constituted. How does a plurality form, and what material
supports are necessary for that formation? Who enters this plurality, and who
does not, and how are such matters decided? Can anyone and everyone act in such
a way that this space is brought about? She makes clear that “this space does
not always exist” and acknowledges that in the classical Polis, the slave, the
foreigner, and the barbarian were excluded from such a space, which means that
they could not become part of a plurality that brought this space into being.
This means that part of the population did not appear, did not emerge into the
space of appearance. And here we can see that the space of appearance was
already divided, already apportioned, if the space of appearance was precisely
that which was defined, in part, by their exclusion. This is no small problem
since it means that one must already be in the space in order to bring the
space of appearance into being – which means that a power operates prior to any
performative power exercised by a plurality. Further, in her view, to be
deprived of the space of appearance is to be deprived of reality. In other
words, we must appear to others in ways that we ourselves cannot know, that we
must become available to a perspective that established by a body that is not
our own. And if we ask, where do we appear? Or where are we when we appear? It
will be over there, between us, in a space that exists only because we are more
than one, more than two, plural and embodied. The body, defined politically, is
precisely organized by a perspective that is not one’s own and is, in that
sense, already elsewhere, for another, and so in departure from oneself.

On this account of the body in political space, how do we make sense
of those who can never be part of that concerted action, who remain outside the
plurality that acts? How do we describe their action and their status as beings
disaggregated from the plural; what political language do we have in reserve
for describing that exclusion? Are they the de-animated “givens” of political
life, mere life or bare life? Are we to say that those who are excluded are
simply unreal, or that they have no being at all - the socially dead, the
spectral? Do such formulations denote a state of having been made destitute by
existing political arrangements, or is this the destitution that is revealed
outside the political sphere itself? In other words, are the destitute outside
of politics and power, or are they in fact living out a specific form of
political destitution? How we answer that question seems important since if we
claim that the destitute are outside of the sphere of politics – reduced to
depoliticized forms of being – then we implicitly accept that the dominant ways
of establishing the political are right. In some ways, this follows from the
Arendtian position which adopts the internal point of view of the Greek Polis
on what politics should be, who should gain entry into the public square and
who should remain in the private sphere. Such a view disregards and devalues
those forms of political agency that emerge precisely in those domains deemed
pre-political or extra-political. So one reason we cannot let the political
body that produces such exclusions furnish the conception of politics itself,
setting the parameters for what counts as political - is that within the
purview established by the Polis those outside its defining plurality are
considered as unreal or unrealized and, hence, outside the political as such.

The impetus for Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” derives from
this very conception of the polis in Arendt’s political philosophy and, I would
suggest, runs the risk of this very problem: if we seek to take account of
exclusion itself as a political problem, as part of politics itself, then it
will not do to say that once excluded, those beings lack appearance or
“reality” in political terms, that they have no social or political standing,
or are cast out and reduced to mere being (forms of givenness precluded from
the sphere of action). Nothing so metaphysically extravagant has to happen if
we agree that one reason the sphere of the political cannot be defined by the
classic conception of the Polis, is that we are then deprived of having and
using a language for those forms of agency and resistance that focus on the
politics of exclusion itself or, indeed, against those regimes of power that
maintain the stateless and disenfranchised in conditions of destitution. Few
matters could be more politically consequential.

Although Agamben borrows from Foucault to articulate a conception of
the biopolitical, the thesis of “bare life” remains untouched by that
conception. As a result, we cannot within that vocabulary describe the modes of
agency and action undertaken by the stateless, the occupied, and the
disenfranchised, since even the life stripped of rights is still within the
sphere of the political, and is thus not reduced to mere being, but is, more
often than not, angered, indignant, rising up and resisting. To be outside
established and legitimate political structures is still to be saturated in
power relations, and this saturation is the point of departure for a theory of
the political that includes dominant and subjugated forms, modes of inclusion
and legitimation as well as modes of delegitimation and effacement.

Luckily, I think Arendt does not consistently follow this model from
The Human Condition, which is why,
for instance, in the early 1960s she turns her attention to the fate of refugees
and the stateless, and comes to assert in that context the right to have
rights. The right to have rights is one that depends on no existing particular
political organization for its legitimacy. In her words, the right to have
rights predates and precedes any political institution that might codify or
seek to guarantee that right; at the same time, it is derived from no natural
set of laws. The right comes into being when it is exercised, and exercised by
those who act in concert, in alliance. Those who are excluded from existing
polities, who belong to no nation-state or other contemporary state formation
may be “unreal” only by those who seek to monopolize the terms of reality. And
yet even after the public sphere has been defined through their exclusion, they
act. Whether abandoned to precarity or left to die through systematic
negligence, concerted action still emerges from such sites. And this is what we
see, for instance, when undocumented workers amass on the street without the
legal right to do so, when populations lay claim to a public square that has
belonged to the military, or when the refugees take place in collective
uprisings demanding shelter, food, and rights of mobility, when populations
amass, without the protection of the law and without permits to demonstrate, to
bring down an unjust or criminal regime of law or to protest austerity measures
that destroy the possibility of employment and education for many.

Indeed, in the public demonstrations that often follow from acts of
public mourning, especially in Syria in recent months where crowds of mourners
become targets of military destruction, we can see how the existing public
space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there, and whose
lives are exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering as they do.
Indeed, it is their right to gather free of intimidation and threat of violence
that is systematically attacked by the police or by the army or by mercenaries
on hire by both the state and corporate powers. To attack the body is to attack
the right itself, since the right is precisely what is exercised by the body on
the street. Although the bodies on the street are vocalizing their opposition
to the legitimacy of the state, they are also, by virtue of occupying that
space, repeating that occupation of space, and persisting in that occupation of
space, posing the challenge in corporeal terms, which means that when the body
“speaks” politically, it is not only in vocal or written language. The
persistence of the body calls that legitimacy into question, and does so
precisely through a performativity of the body that crosses language without
ever quite reducing to language. In other words, it is not that bodily action
and gesture have to be translated into language, but that both action and
gesture signify and speak, as action and claim, and that the one is not finally
extricable from the other. Where the legitimacy of the state is brought into
question precisely by that way of appearing in public, the body itself
exercises a right that is no right; in other words, it exercises a right that
is being actively contested and destroyed by military force, and which, in its
resistance to force, articulates its persistence, and its right to persistence.
This right is codified nowhere. It is not granted from elsewhere or by existing
law, even if it sometimes finds support precisely there. It is, in fact, the
right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as
the persistence of the body against those forces that seek to monopolize
legitimacy. A persistence that requires the mobilization of space, and that
cannot happen without a set of material supports mobilized and mobilizing.

Just to be clear: I am not referring to a vitalism or a right to
life as such. Rather, I am suggesting that political claims are made by bodies
as they appear and act, as they refuse and as they persist under conditions in
which that fact alone is taken to be an act of delegitimation of the state. It
is not that bodies are simply mute life-forces that counter existing modalities
of power. Rather, they are themselves modalities of power, embodied
interpretations, engaging in allied action. On the one hand, these bodies are
productive and performative. On the other hand, they can only persist and act
when they are supported, by environments, by nutrition, by work, by modes of
sociality and belonging. And when these supports fall away, they are mobilized
in another way, seizing upon the supports that exist in order to make a claim
that there can be no embodied life without social and institutional support,
without ongoing employment, without networks of interdependency and care. They
struggle not only for the idea of social support and political enfranchisement,
but their struggle takes on a social form of its own. And so, in the most ideal
instances, an alliance enacts the social order it seeks to bring about, but
when this happens, and it does happen, we have to be mindful of two important
caveats. The first is that the alliance is not reducible to individuals, and it
is not individuals who act. The second is that action in alliance happens
precisely between those who participate, and this is not an ideal or empty
space – it is the space of support itself – of durable and liveable material
environments and of interdependency among living beings. I will move toward
this last idea toward the end of my remarks this evening. But let us return to
the demonstrations, in their logic and in their instances.

It is not only that many of the massive demonstrations and modes of
resistance we have seen in the last months produce a space of appearance, they
also seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power,
seeking to sever the relation between the public space, the public square, and
the existing regime. So the limits of the political are exposed, and the link
between the theatre of legitimacy and public space is severed; that theatre is
no longer unproblematically housed in public space, since public space now
occurs in the midst of another action, one that displaces the power that claims
legitimacy precisely by taking over the field of its effects. Simply put, the
bodies on the street redeploy the space of appearance in order to contest and
negate the existing forms of political legitimacy – and just as they sometimes
fill or take over public space, the material history of those structures also
work on them, and become part of their very action, remaking a history in the
midst of its most concrete and sedimented artifices. These are subjugated and
empowered actors who seek to wrest legitimacy from an existing state apparatus
that depends upon the public space of appearance for its theatrical
self-constitution. In wresting that power, a new space is created, a new
“between” of bodies, as it were, that lays claim to existing space through the
action of a new alliance, and those bodies are seized and animated by those
existing spaces in the very acts by which they reclaim and resignify their
meanings.

For this contestation to work, there has to be a hegemonic struggle
over what we are calling the space of appearance. Such a struggle intervenes in
the spatial organization of power, which includes the allocation and
restriction of spatial locations in which and by which any population may
appear, which means that there is a spatial restriction on when and how the
“popular will” may appear. This view of the spatial restriction and allocation
of who may appear, in effect, who may become a subject of appearance, suggests
an operation of power that works through both foreclosure and differential
allocation. How is such an idea of power, and its corollary idea of politics,
to be reconciled with the Arendtian proposition that politics requires not only
entering into a space of appearance, but an active participation in the making
of the space of appearance itself. And further, I would add, it requires a way
of acting in the midst of being formed by that history and its material
structures.

One can see the operation of a strong performative in Arendt’s work
– in acting, we bring the space of politics into being, understood as the space
of appearance. It is a divine performative allocated to the human form. But as
a result, she cannot account for the ways in which the established architecture
and topographies of power act upon us, and enter into our very action sometimes
foreclosing our entry into the political sphere, or making us differentially
apparent within that sphere. And yet, to work within these two forms of power,
we have to think about bodies in ways that Arendt does not do, and we have to
think about space as acting on us, even as we act within it, or even when
sometimes our actions, considered as plural or collective, bring it into being.

If we consider what it is to appear, it follows that we appear to
someone, and that our appearance has to be registered by the senses, not only
our own, but someone else’s, or some larger group. For the Arendtian position,
it follows that to act and speak politically we must “appear” to one another in
some way, that is to say, that to appear is always to appear for another, which
means that for the body to exist politically, it has to assume a social
dimension – it is comported outside itself and toward others in ways that
cannot and do not ratify individualism. Assuming that we are living and
embodied organisms when we speak and act, the organism assumes social and
political form in the space of appearance. This does not mean that we overcome
or negate some biological status to assume a social one; on the contrary, the
organic bodies that we are require a sustaining social world in order to
persist. And this means that as biological creatures who seek to persist, we
are necessarily dependent on social relations and institutions that address the
basic needs for food, shelter, and protection from violence, to name a few. No
monadic body simply persists on its own, but if it persists, it is in the
context of a sustaining set of relations. So if we approach the question of the
bio-political in this way, we can see that the space of appearance does not
belong to a sphere of politics separate from a sphere of survival and of need.
When the question of the survival not only of individuals, but whole
populations, is at issue, then the political issue has to do with whether and
how a social and political formation addresses the demand to provide for basic
needs such as shelter and food, and protection against violence. And the
question for a critical and contesting politics has to do with how basic goods
are distributed, how life itself is allocated, and how the unequal distribution
of the value and grievability of life is instituted by targeted warfare as well
as systematic forms of exploitation or negligence, which render populations
differentially precarious and disposable.

A quite problematic division of labor is at work in Arendt’s
position, which is why we must rethink her position for our times. If we
appear, we must be seen, which means that our bodies must be viewed and their
vocalized sounds must be heard: the body must enter the visual and audible
field. But we have to ask why, if this is so, the body is itself divided into
the one that appears publically to speak and act, and another, sexual and
laboring, feminine, foreign and mute, that generally relegated to the private
and pre-political sphere. That latter body operates as a precondition for
appearance, and so becomes the structuring absence that governs and makes
possible the public sphere. If we are living organisms who speak and act, then
we are clearly related to a vast continuum or network of living beings; we not
only live among them, but our persistence as living organisms depends on that
matrix of sustaining interdependent relations. And yet, if our speaking and
acting distinguishes us as something separate from that corporeal realm (raised
earlier by the question of whether our capacity to think politically depends on
one sort of physei or another), we have to ask how such a duality between
action and body can be preserved if and when the “living” word and “actual”
deed – both clearly political – so clearly presuppose the presence and action
of a living human body, one whose life is bound up with other living processes.
It may be that two senses of the body are at work for Arendt – one that appears
in public, and another that is “sequestered” in private –, and that the public
body is one that makes itself known as the figure of the speaking subject, one
whose speech is also action. The private body never appears as such, since it
is preoccupied with the repetitive labor of reproducing the material conditions
of life. The private body thus conditions the public body, and even though they
are the same body, the bifurcation is crucial to maintaining the public and
private distinction. Perhaps this is a kind of fantasy that one dimension of
bodily life can and must remain out of sight, and yet another, fully distinct,
appears in public? But is there no trace of the biological that appears as
such, and could we not argue, with Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, that
negotiating the sphere of appearance is a biological thing to do, since there
is no way of navigating an environment or procuring food without appearing
bodily in the world, and there is no escape from the vulnerability and mobility
that appearing in the world implies? In other words, is appearance not a
necessarily morphological moment where the body appears, and not only in order
to speak and act, but also to suffer and to move, to engage others bodies, to
negotiate an environment on which one depends? Indeed, the body can appear and
signify in ways that contest the way it speaks, or even contest speaking as its
paradigmatic instance. Indeed, could we still understand action, gesture,
stillness, touch, and moving together, if they were all reducible to the
vocalization of thought through speech?

Indeed, this act of public speaking, even within that problematic
division of labour, depends upon a
dimension of bodily life that is given, passive, opaque and so excluded from
the realm of the political. Hence, we can ask, what regulation keeps the given
body from spilling over into the active body? Are these two different bodies
and what politics is required to keep them apart? Are these two different
dimensions of the same body, or are these, in fact, the effect of a certain
regulation of bodily appearance that is actively contested by new social
movements, struggles against sexual violence, for reproductive freedom, against
precarity, for the freedom of mobility? Here we can see that a certain topographical
or even architectural regulation of the body happens at the level of theory.
Significantly, it is precisely this operation of power – foreclosure and
differential allocation of whether and how the body may appear – which is
excluded from Arendt’s explicit account of the political. Indeed, her explicit
account of the political depends upon that very operation of power that it
fails to consider as part of politics itself.

So what I accept is the following: Freedom does not come from me or
from you; it can and does happen as a relation between us or, indeed, among us.
So this is not a matter of finding the human dignity within each person, but
rather of understanding the human as a relational and social being, one whose
action depends upon equality and articulates the principle of equality. Indeed,
there is no human on her view if there is no equality. No human can be human
alone. And no human can be human without acting in concert with others and on
conditions of equality. I would add the following: The claim of equality is not
only spoken or written, but is made precisely when bodies appear together or,
rather, when, through their action, they bring the space of appearance into
being. This space is a feature and effect of action, and it only works, according
to Arendt, when relations of equality are maintained.

Of course, there are many reasons to be suspicious of idealized
moments, but there are also reasons to be wary of any analysis that is fully
guarded against idealization. There are two aspects of the revolutionary
demonstrations in Tahrir square that I would like to underscore. The first has
to do with the way a certain sociability was established within the square, a
division of labor that broke down gender difference, that involved rotating who
would speak and who would clean the areas where people slept and ate,
developing a work schedule for everyone to maintain the environment and to
clean the toilets. In short, what some would call “horizontal relations” among
the protestors formed easily and methodically, and quickly it seemed that
relations of equality, which included an equal division of labour between the
sexes, became part of the very resistance to Mubarek’s regime and its
entrenched hierarchies, including the extraordinary differentials of wealth
between the military and corporate sponsors of the regime, and the working
people. So the social form of the resistance began to incorporate principles of
equality that governed not only how and when people spoke and acted for the
media and against the regime, but how people cared for their various quarters
within the square, the beds on pavement, the makeshift medical stations and
bathrooms, the places where people ate, and the places where people were
exposed to violence from the outside. These actions were all political in the
simple sense that they were breaking down a conventional distinction between
public and private in order to establish relations of equality; in this sense,
they were incorporating into the very social form of resistance the principles
for which they were struggling on the street.

Secondly, when up against violent attack or extreme threats, many
people chanted the word "silmiyya" which comes from the root verb
(salima) which means to be safe and sound, unharmed, unimpaired, intact, safe,
and secure; but also, to be unobjectionable, blameless, faultless; and yet
also, to be certain, established, clearly proven[1].
The term comes from the noun "silm" which means "peace" but
also, interchangeably and significantly, "the religion of Islam." One
variant of the term is “Hubb as-silm” which is Arabic for "pacifism."
Most usually, the chanting of “Silmiyya” comes across as a gentle exhortation:
“peaceful, peaceful.” Although the revolution was for the most part non-violent,
it was not necessarily led by a principled opposition to violence. Rather, the
collective chant was a way of encouraging people to resist the mimetic pull of
military aggression – and the aggression of the gangs – by keeping in mind the
larger goal – radical democratic change. To be swept into a violent exchange of
the moment was to lose the patience needed to realize the revolution. What
interests me here is the chant, the way in which language worked not to incite
an action, but to restrain one. A restraint in the name of an emerging
community of equals whose primary way of doing politics would not be violence.

Of course, Tahrir Square is a place, and we can locate it quite
precisely on the map of Cairo. At the same time, we find questions posed
throughout the media: will the Palestinians have their Tahrir square? Where is
the Tahrir Square in India? To name but a few. So it is located, and it is
transposable; indeed, it seemed to be transposable from the start, though never
completely. And, of course, we cannot think the transposability of those bodies
in the square without the media. In some ways, the media images from Tunisia
prepared the way for the media events in Tahrir, and then those that followed
in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya, all of which took different trajectories,
and take them still. As you know many of the public demonstrations of these
last months have not been against military dictatorships or tyrannical regimes.
They have also been against the monopoly capitalism, neo-liberalism, and the
suppression of political rights, and in the name of those who are abandoned by
neo-liberal reforms that seek to dismantle forms of social democracy and
socialism, that eradicate jobs, expose populations to poverty, and undermine
the basic right to a public education.

The street scenes become politically potent only when and if we have
a visual and audible version of the scene communicated in live time, so that
the media does not merely report the scene, but is part of the scene and the
action; indeed, the media is the
scene or the space in its extended and replicable visual and audible
dimensions. One way of stating this is simply that the media extends the scene
visually and audibly and participates in the delimitation and transposability
of the scene. Put differently, the media constitutes the scene in a time and
place that includes and exceeds its local instantiation. Although the scene is
surely and emphatically local, and those who are elsewhere have the sense that
they are getting some direct access through the images and sounds they receive.
That is true, but they do not know how the editing takes place, which scene
conveys and travels, and which scenes remain obdurately outside the frame. When
the scene does travel, it is both there and
here, and if it were not spanning both locations – indeed, multiple locations –
it would not be the scene that it is. Its locality is not denied by the fact
that the scene is communicated beyond itself, and so constituted in a global
media; it depends on that mediation to take place as the event that it is. This
means that the local must be recast outside itself in order to be established
as local, and this means that it is only through a certain globalizing media
that the local can be established, and that something can really happen there.
Of course, many things do happen outside the frame of the camera or other
digital media devices, and the media can just as easily implement censorship as
oppose it. There are many local events that are never recorded and broadcast,
and some important reasons why. But when the event does travel and manages to
summon and sustain global outrage and pressure, which includes the power to
stop markets or to sever diplomatic relations, then the local will have to be
established time and again in a circuitry that exceeds the local at every
instant. And yet, there remains something localized that cannot and does not
travel in that way; and the scene could not be the scene if we did not
understand that some people are at risk, and the risk is run precisely by those
bodies on the street. If they are transported in one way, they are surely left
in place in another, holding the camera or the cell phone, face to face with
those they oppose, unprotected, injurable, injured, persistent, if not
insurgent. It matters that those bodies carry cell phones, relaying messages
and images, and so when they are attacked, it is more often than not in some
relation to the camera or the video recorder. It can be an effort to destroy
the camera and its user, or it can be a spectacle of destruction for the
camera, a media event produced as a warning or a threat. Or it can be a way to
stop any more organizing. Is the action of the body separable from its
technology, and how does the technology determine new forms of political
action? And when censorship or violence are directed against those bodies, are
they not also directed against its access to media, and in order to establish
hegemonic control over which images travel, and which do not?

Of course, the dominant media is corporately owned, exercising its
own kinds of censorship and incitement. And yet, it still seems important to
affirm that the freedom of the media to broadcast from these sites is itself an
exercise of freedom, and so a mode of exercising rights, especially when it is
rogue media, from the street, evading the censor, where the activation of the
instrument is part of the bodily action itself. So the media not only reports
on social and political movements that are laying claim to freedom and justice
in various ways; the media is also exercising one of those freedoms for which
the social movement struggles. I do not mean by this claim to suggest that all
media is involved in the struggle for political freedom and social justice (we
know, of course, that it is not). Of course, it matters which global media does
the reporting and how. My point is that sometimes private media devices become
global precisely at the moment in which they overcome modes of censorship to
report protests and, in that way, become part of the protest itself.

What bodies are doing on the street when they are demonstrating, is
linked fundamentally to what communication devices and technologies are doing
when they “report” on what is happening in the street. These are different
actions, but they both require bodily actions. The one exercise of freedom is
linked to the other exercise, which means that both are ways of exercising
rights, and that jointly they bring a space of appearance into being and secure
its transposability. Although some may wager that the exercise of rights now
takes place quite at the expense of bodies on the street, that twitter and
other virtual technologies have led to a disembodiment of the public sphere, I
disagree. The media requires those bodies on the street to have an event, even
as the street requires the media to exist in a global arena. But under
conditions when those with cameras or internet capacities are imprisoned or
tortured or deported, then the use of the technology effectively implicates the
body. Not only must someone’s hand tap and send, but someone’s body is on the
line if that tapping and sending gets traced. In other words, localization is
hardly overcome through the use of a media that potentially transmits globally.
And if this conjuncture of street and media constitutes a very contemporary
version of the public sphere, then bodies on the line have to be thought as
both there and here, now and then, transported and stationery, with very
different political consequences following from those two modalities of space
and time.

It matters that it is public squares that are filled to the brim,
that people eat and sleep there, sing and refuse to cede that space, as we saw
in Tahrir Square, and continue to see on a daily basis. It matters as well that
it is public educational buildings that have been seized in Athens, London, and
Berkeley. At Berkeley,
buildings were seized, and trespassing fines were handed out. In some cases,
students were accused of destroying private property. But these very
allegations raised the question of whether the university is public or private.
The stated aim of the protest – to seize the building and to sequester
themselves there – was a way to gain a platform, indeed, a way to secure
the material conditions for appearing in public. Such actions generally do not
take place when effective platforms are already available. The students there,
but also at Goldsmiths College in the UK more recently were seizing buildings
as a way to lay claim to buildings that ought properly, now and in the future,
to belong to public education. That doesn't mean that every time these
buildings are seized it is justifiable, but let us be alert to what is at stake
here: the symbolic meaning of seizing these buildings is that these buildings
belong to the public, to public education; it is precisely the access to public
education which is being undermined by fee and tuition hikes and budget cuts;
we should not be surprised that the protest took the form of seizing the
buildings, performatively laying claim to public education, insisting on
gaining literal access to the buildings of public education precisely at a
moment, historically, when that access is being shut down. In other words, no
positive law justifies these actions that oppose the institutionalization of
unjust or exclusionary forms of power. So can we say that these actions are
nevertheless an exercise of a right and, if so, what kind?

Modes of Alliance and the Police
Function

Let me offer you an anecdote to make my point more concrete. Last
year, I was asked to visit Turkey on the occasion of the International
Conference against Homophobia and Transphobia. This was an especially important
event in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, where transgendered people are often
served fines for appearing in public, are often beaten, sometimes by the
police, and where murders of transgendered women in particular happen nearly
once a month in recent years. If I offer you this example of Turkey, it is not
to point out that Turkey is “behind” – something that the embassy
representative from Denmark was quick to point out to me, and which I refused
with equal speed. I assure you that there are equally brutal murders outside of
Los Angeles and Detroit, in Wyoming and Louisiana, or even New York. It is
rather because what is astonishing about the alliances there is that several
feminist organizations have worked with queer, gay/lesbian and transgendered
people against police violence, but also against militarism, against
nationalism, and against the forms of masculinism by which they are supported.
So on the street, after the conference, the feminist lined up with the drag
queens, the genderqueer with the human rights activists, and the lipstick
lesbians with their bisexual and heterosexual friends – the march included secularists
and muslims. They chanted, “we will not be soldiers, and we will not kill.” To
oppose the police violence against trans people is thus to be openly against
military violence and the nationalist escalation of militarism; it is also to
be against the military aggression against the Kurds, but also, to act in the
memory of the Armenian genocide and against the various ways that violence is
disavowed by the state and the media.

This alliance was compelling for me for all kinds of reasons, but
mainly because in most Northern European countries, there are now serious
divisions among feminists, queers, lesbian and gay human rights workers,
anti-racist movements, freedom of religion movements, and anti- poverty and
anti-war mobilizations. In Lyon, France last year, one of the established
feminists had written a book on the “illusion” of transsexuality, and her
public lectures had been “zapped” by many trans activists and their queer
allies. She defended herself by saying that to call transsexuality psychotic
was not the same as pathologizing transsexuality. It is, she said, a
descriptive term, and makes no judgment or prescription. Under what conditions
can calling a population “psychotic” for the particular embodied life they live
not be pathologizing? This feminist called herself a materialist, a radical,
but she pitted herself against the transgendered community in order to maintain
certain norms of masculinity and femininity as pre-requisites to a
non-psychotic life. These are arguments that would be swiftly countered in
Istanbul or Johannesburg, and yet, these same feminists seek recourse to a form
of universalism that would make France, and their version of French feminism,
into the beacon of progressive thought.

Not all French feminists who call themselves universalists would
oppose the public rights of transgendered people, or contribute to their
pathologization. And yet, if the streets are open to transgendered people, they
are not open to those who wear signs of their religious belonging openly. Hence,
we are left to fathom the many universalist French feminists who call upon the
police to arrest, detain, fine, and sometimes deport women wearing the Niqab or
the Burka in the public sphere in France. What sort of politics is this that
recruits the police function of the state to monitor and restrict women from
religious minorities in the public sphere? Why would the same universalists
(Elisabeth Badinter) openly affirm the rights of transgendered people to freely
appear in public while restricting that very right to women who happen to wear
religious clothing that offends the sensibilities of die-hard secularists? If
the right to appear is to be honored “universally” it would not be able to
survive such an obvious and insupportable contradiction.[2]

To walk on the street without police interference is something other
than assembling there en masse. And yet, when a transgendered person walks
there, the right that is exercised in a bodily form does not only belong to
that one person. There is a group, if not an alliance, walking there, too,
whether or not they are seen. Perhaps we can call “performative” both this
exercise of gender and the embodied political claim to equal treatment, to be
protected from violence, and to be able to move with and within this social
category in public space. To walk is to say that this is a public space in
which transgendered people walk, that this is a public space where people with
various forms of clothing, no matter how they are gendered or what religion
they signify, are free to move without threat of violence. But this
performativity applies more broadly to the conditions by which any of us emerge
as bodily creatures in the world.

How, finally, do we understand this body? Is it a distinctively
human body, a gendered body, and is it finally possible to distinguish between
that domain of the body that is given and that which is made? If we invest in
humans the power to make the body into a political signifier, then do we assume
that in becoming political, the body distinguishes itself from its own
animality and the sphere of animals? In other words, how do we think this idea
of the exercise of freedom and rights within the space of appearance that takes
us beyond anthropocentrism? Here again, I think the conception of the living
body is key. After all, the life that is worth preserving, even when considered
exclusively human, is connected to non-human life in essential ways; this
follows from the idea of the human animal. Thus, if we are thinking well, and
our thinking commits us to the preservation of life in some form, then the life
to be preserved takes a bodily form. In turn, this means that the life of the
body – its hunger, its need for shelter and protection from violence – would
all become major issues of politics. Even the most given or non-chosen features
of our lives are not simply given; they are given in history and in
language, in vectors of power that none of us chose. Equally true is that a
given property of the body or a set of defining characteristics depend upon the
continuing persistence of the body. Those social categories we never chose
traverse this body that is given in some ways rather than in others, and
gender, for instance, names that traversal as well as the trajectory of its
transformations. In this sense, those most urgent and non-volitional dimensions
of our lives, which include hunger and the need for shelter, medical care, and
protection from violence, natural or humanly imposed, are crucial to politics.
We cannot presume the enclosed and well-fed space of the Polis where all the
material needs are somehow being taken care of elsewhere by beings whose
gender, race, or status render them ineligible for public recognition. Rather,
we have to not only bring the material urgencies of the body into the square,
but make those needs central to the demands of politics.

In my view, a different social ontology would have to start from the
presumption that there is a shared condition of precarity that situates our
political lives. And some of us, as Ruthie Gilmore has made very clear, are
disproportionately disposed to injury and early death than others, and racial
difference can be tracked precisely through looking at statistics on infant
mortality; this means, in brief, that precarity is unequally distributed and
that lives are not considered equally grievable or equally valuable. If, as
Adriana Cavarero has argued, the exposure of our bodies in public space
constitutes us fundamentally, and establishes our thinking as social and
embodied, vulnerable and passionate, then our thinking gets nowhere without the
presupposition of that very corporeal interdependency and entwinement. The body
is constituted through perspectives it cannot inhabit; someone else sees our
face in a way that none of us can. We are in this way, even as located, always
elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us. This establishes our
exposure and our precarity, the ways in which we depend on political and social
institutions to persist.

After all, in Cairo, it was not just that people amassed in the
square: they were there; they slept there; they dispensed medicine and food,
they assembled and sang, and they spoke. Can we distinguish those vocalizations
from the body from those other expressions of material need and urgency? They were,
after all, sleeping and eating in the public square, constructing toilets and
various systems for sharing the space, and so not only refusing to be
privatized – refusing to go or stay home – and not only claiming the public
domain for themselves – acting in concert on conditions of equality – but also
maintaining themselves as persisting bodies with needs, desires, and
requirements. Arendtian and counter-Arendtian, to be sure. Since these bodies
who were organizing their most basic needs in public were also petitioning the
world to register what was happening there, to make its support known, and in
that way to enter into revolutionary action itself. The bodies acted in
concert, but they also slept in public, and in both these modalities, they were
both vulnerable and demanding, giving political and spatial organization to
elementary bodily needs. In this way, they formed themselves into images to be
projected to all of who watched, petitioning us to receive and respond, and so
to enlist media coverage that would refuse to let the event be covered over or
to slip away. Sleeping on that pavement was not only a way to lay claim to the
public, to contest the legitimacy of the state, but also quite clearly, a way
to put the body on the line in its insistence, obduracy and precarity,
overcoming the distinction between public and private for the time of
revolution. In other words, it was only when those needs that are supposed to
remain private came out into the day and night of the square, formed into image
and discourse for the media, did it finally become possible to extend the space
and time of the event with such tenacity to bring the regime down. After all,
the cameras never stopped, bodies were there and here, they never stopped
speaking, not even in sleep, and so could not be silenced, sequestered or
denied – revolution happened because everyone refused to go home, cleaving to the pavement, acting in concert.

Lecture
held in Venice, 7 September 2011, in the framework of the series The State of
Things, organized by the Office for Contemporary Art
Norway (OCA).

[2] Perhaps there are modalities of violence that we need to think
about in order to understand the police functions in operation here. After all,
those who insist that gender must always appear in one way or in one clothed
version rather than another, who seek either to criminalize or to pathologize
those who live their gender or their sexuality in non-normative ways, are
themselves acting as the police for the sphere of appearance whether or not
they belong to any police force. As we know, it is sometimes the police force
of the state that does violence to sexual and gendered minorities, and
sometimes it is the police who fail to investigate, fail to prosecute as
criminal the murder of transgendered women, or fail to prevent violence against
transgendered members of the population.
If gender or sexual minorities are criminalized or pathologized for how they
appear, how they lay claim to public space, the language through which they
understand themselves, the means by which they express love or desire, those
with whom they openly ally, choose to be near, engage sexually, or how they
exercise their bodily freedom, what clothes they wear or fail to wear, then
those acts of criminalization are themselves violent; and in that sense, they
are also unjust and criminal. In Arendtian terms, we can say that to be
precluded from the space of appearance, to be precluded from being part of the
plurality that brings the space of appearance into being, is to be deprived of
the right to have rights. Plural and public action is the exercise of the right
to place and belonging, and this exercise is the means by which the space of
appearance is presupposed and brought into being.
Let me return to the notion of gender with which I began, both to draw upon
Arendt and to resist Arendt. In my view, gender is an exercise of freedom,
which is not to say that everything that constitutes gender is freely chosen,
but only that even what is considered unfree can and must be claimed and
exercised in some way. I have, with this formulation, taken a certain distance
from the Arendtian formulation. This exercise of freedom must be accorded the
same equal treatment as any other exercise of freedom under the law. And
politically, we must call for the expansion of our conceptions of equality to
include this form of embodied freedom. So what do we mean when we say that
sexuality or gender is an exercise of freedom? To repeat: I do not mean to say
that all of us choose our gender or our sexuality. We are surely formed by
language and culture, by history, by the social struggles in which we
participate, by forces both psychological and historical – in interaction, by
the way with biological situations that have their own history and efficacy.
Indeed, we may well feel that what and how we desire are quite fixed, indelible
or irreversible features of who we are. But regardless of whether we understand
our gender or our sexuality as chosen or given, we each have a right to claim
that gender and to claim that sexuality. And it makes a difference whether we
can claim them at all. When we exercise the right to appear as the gender we
already are – even when we feel we have no other choice – we are still
exercising a certain freedom, but we are also doing something more.
When one freely exercises the right to be who one already is, and one asserts a
social category for the purposes of describing that mode of being, then one is,
in fact, making freedom part of that very social category, discursively
changing the very ontology in question. It is not possible to separate the
genders that we claim to be and the sexualities that we engage from the right
that any of us has to assert those realities in public or in private, or in the
many thresholds that exist between the two, freely, that is, without threat of
violence. When, long ago, one said that gender is performative, that meant that
it is a certain kind of enactment, which means that one is not first one’s
gender and then one decides how and when to enact it. The enactment is part of
its very ontology, is a way of rethinking the ontological mode of gender, and
so it matters how and when and with what consequences that enactment takes
place, because all that changes the very gender that one “is.”